(March 30 – 11:05 ET) – The Ontario government has increased the time limits for formal take-over bids to give directors of target companies adequate time to communicate with their shareholders and encourage alternative bids.

“We have extended take-over bid time periods from 21 days to 35 days to better serve the interests of shareholders and also strike a balance between the interests of the take-over bid targets and bidders,” says Ontario’s Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty.

These amendments will come into effect on March 31, 2001 in Ontario. All other provinces with bid rules, apart from Quebec, will implement similar changes to their respective securities laws at the same time as Ontario.

The new time periods were recommended by a committee that was sponsored by the Investment Dealers Association of Canada (IDA) and chaired by Adam Zimmerman, retired chairman of Noranda Forest Inc. The committee’s 17 members were drawn from the major participant groups in Canada’s capital markets.

The amendments permit an offeror to commence a take-over bid by advertisement. The offeror must simultaneously deliver a copy of the take-over bid circular to the target company, and file it on the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) where it is made public on the SEDAR website.

Previously, an offeror could not commence a bid until after it received the shareholder list from the target.
-IE Staff